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Tag: SalesForce

Following on from my previous post about how to healthcheck a CRM system, I wanted to share with you why I think people either love or hate their CRM systems. In most cases its not because one system is better than the other, though there are some systems that don’t fit the not for profit market, it is because users have either bought into the system and can see the benefits or they can’t.

I tell this story a lot but it is one of my most vivid memories of when I started working in the sector. I remember a member of staff, who in the run up to the London Marathon was struggling under the burden of paper that was printed out and then manually entered into the CRM system. It was taking about 3 out of the 5 days in the week to process this data. Now, this wasn’t because the CRM system was rubbish or even that the person didn’t know better, but more because the person who was spending their day wrapped up in paper wasn’t aware of the different things that their CRM system could do.

It’s been over a year in the planning and execution but JustGiving have this week launched their data Api’s. This allows all of your JustGiving reporting data to be surfaced through api calls.

JustGiving’s open platform allows any third party to develop new tools using its fundraising and reporting technology. There is a clear demand from charities wanting to connect JustGiving with their fundraising database. Earlier this year, 61% of charities surveyed by JustGiving reported an interest in achieving this.

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I think that Salesforce is going to be a big player in 2012 in terms of fundraising databases. We’ve already seen Blackbaud and Convio get together and the rise of Supporter360 from Appichar. So if you’re interested here’s a link to some training materials for Salesforce.

One of the best ways to get the most out of Salesforce is to take advantage of the incredible wealth of videos on the internet. It’s also a good way to learn if Salesforce is the right tool for you.

Salesforce has free training videos on Salesforce Navigation, Intro to Sales, Intro to Reports and Dashboards, and for those who need to configure Salesforce, Administration Basics.

Similar to that is the Salesforce Learning Center, which has a few dozen videos in the 2-10 minute range, and a number of 2 page ‘cheat sheets’, a decent place if you are looking for a certain skill.

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Supporter 360 – As Profound as the iPhone? AppiChar, one of the fastest growing technology companies in the UK and Australia is about to launch supporter360, the complete supporter relationship management and fundraising system based on the Salesforce.com platform.

As part of the launch into the UK, appiChar are looking for 5 founding customers to work closely with and make sure the product is as amazing as possible. Already not-for-profit organisations in Australia are signing up to supporter360 and about to see the full benefit of fundraising on the world’s most powerful technology and relationship management platform.

There is also a special session in the afternoon specifically for NFP’s on how to get the best from Salesforce. It’s a free event, so if you are thinking about using Salesforce this might be for you.

Join salesforce.com Chairman and CEO Marc Benioff and cloud leaders VMware and BMC for the enterprise-computing event of the year. Hear from customers who are adopting Chatter in their business to drive collaboration and increase productivity across their sales and service teams, and the entire enterprise.See the latest cloud breakthroughs—featuring live demonstrations from companies that are using cloud computing, Chatter, the Sales Cloud, the Service Cloud, and Force.com to lead their industries and grow their business.